Another advantage is to be found in the significant mechanical advances of the last few years, the significance of the growing importance of offset printing, presenting so many opportunities yet to be grasped by the designer. And, an infant industry now, but one of vast possibilities, is commercial silk-screen printing.
But upon my return to New York after many years in California I think my greatest thrill came when I witnessed the mechanical setting of type by photography. Always I have liked the feel of putting type into the stick, and I liked to see the composition growing on the galley. In all my years of working with type I have never made a preparatory lay-out, except when the composition had to be done by another, which happened only on magazine headings after a style had been determined in advance.
But this is an age of lay-outs, and in this new photographic process with the use of photographic enlargements, there are possibilities for display composition of any required size, and great variety, presenting intriguing possibilities for the creative designer and typographer.
All such steadily growing advances present opportunities which were nonexistent back in my own youthful days. Together with the superior training enjoyed by the youth of today, they have changed conditions into a new world fraught with wonderful opportunities far beyond any I knew in the Nineties.
w b
Short Hills, New Jersey
May, 1954
A CHRONOLOGY
This brief biography of the man called Dean of American Designers by The Saturday Evening Post and Dean of American Art Editors by Publishers’ Weekly, is amplified from its earlier compilation and printing as a Typophile keepsake in 1948. It was first distributed at a birthday luncheon held in New York, for Mr. Bradley’s eightieth.